SENATOR Mary Grace Poe, the front-runner in the latest presidential surveys, is not only a Filipino citizen but a natural-born one, an Immigration certificate and other documents show.
Poe submitted the documents to the Senate Electoral Tribunal hearing the petition over her citizenship, which was filed by Rizalito David, a losing senatorial candidate in the 2013 elections, in a bid to unseat her and block her possible presidential run.
David asked the tribunal to remove Poe from the Senate for not being a natural-born Filipino citizen and for failing to meet the two-year residency before the last elections, where she emerged as the top winner.
In the order dated July 18, 2006, then Immigration Commissioner Alipio Fernandez Jr., through Associate Commissioner Roy Almoro, declared that Poe was “presumed to be a natural-born Philippine citizen” for being a former citizen of the Philippines.
The order came after Immigration approved Poe’s application to reacquire her Filipino citizenship as that of her three minor children. They submitted their application on July 10, 2006.
During the deliberations on the 1934 Constitutional Convention to craft the 1935 Constitution, Poe said, the framers had the intention to include foundlings in the term citizens of the Philippines, and that they clearly adopted the international principle that children or people born in a country of unknown parents were citizens of the country where they were found.
Poe also cited a Department of Justice opinion in 1951 in which it ruled in favor of a boy who survived an air raid in the Philippines during the second World War but whose parents had been killed, rendering ascertaining his identity impossible.
The department granted his application for a Philippine passport as it declared that foundlings were citizens of the country in which they were found by virtue of the principles of international law.
In an apparent bid to address the issues questioning her lack of the required 10-year residency to run for President in the 2016 elections, Poe said she had been in the country since May 2005, when she decided to live here for good after the death of her father, actor Fernando Poe Jr.
Poe said her family had decided to abandon their life in the United States and to return to the Philippines for good in May 2005. She said she pulled her children from their schools in the Unites States and enrolled them in Philippine schools in June 2005. They even sold their house in April 2006, and her husband found employment in a local conglomerate in May 2006.
In many cases, she said, the Supreme Court had reckoned the residency requirement from the date of the actual return, “when his physical presence in the Philippines concurred with his intention to reside here permanently, and not for the date of his reacquisition of citizenship.”
She said in the case of Zamboanga Sibugay Gov. Rommel Jalosjos, who became a naturalized Australian citizen but who decided to return to the country and renounce his foreign citizenship, the Supreme Court reckoned his residency from his return, when his physical presence in the Philippines was consistent with his intention to reside here permanently and not from the date of his reacquisition of citizenship.
